If you’ve been waiting for some great beats to get 2020 started, Gino McKoy and rapper Diamond have got your needs covered with their new single “Sensy Girl,” a track that makes up one-third of the stunning extended play (and feature film soundtrack) Lumina. “Sensy Girl” is a melody-powered swing jam with a lusty lyrical wit at the center of its multilayered harmonies, but although it’s one of the more complexly arranged pop numbers I’ve come across in the American underground lately, I wouldn’t say that it’s an overly complicated composition at all. In Gino McKoy, listeners can expect to find a songwriter and a vocalist who is as in love with the little details within his music as he is the medium itself, which isn’t something that can be said about a lot of indie artists today.
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/ginomckoy/
There’s a terrific chemistry between McKoy and his hip-hop counterpart in Diamond that you can tell isn’t being forced upon them by some higher conglomerate in the music industry; it’s wholly organic and the product of their own intellectual and spiritual connection to the craft. The only discord that we find in “Sensy Girl” is created by the churn of the instrumentation, giving Diamond and our leading man plenty of room to fill in the edges with colorful vocal prowess. The rap is well-fitting for the surreal backdrop it’s given by the band, and beside McKoy’s sexy lead crooning, its makes the surrounding groove even more intoxicating from beginning to end.
Production-wise, I think that “Sensy Girl” is good for both the club environment as well as casual radio listening, which is an extremely rare combination for a single these days. The muscularity of the music makes it prime for dancing the night away at our favorite nightclub, while the streamlined efficiency of the hook – as well as the sensational vocals from both Gino McKoy and Diamond – make it a strong listen for pop radio, a format that has become increasingly eclectic in the last ten years. There’s no overindulgence for us to sift through here, but in the very bedrock of the bassline, vocal and drums, there’s more intricacies than one would ever expect to be discovering in a track that was designed for the approval of mass audiences.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/album/id/1467280816
While I wasn’t super familiar with the works of Diamond or Gino McKoy prior to getting a copy of “Sensy Girl” and the Lumina EP from a colleague in the business, I’ll be listening to both throughout 2020 as a soundtrack to late night explorations and skyline observations alike. The future is wide open for McKoy right now, and as long as he continues to come up with output as intuitive and poetic as he has with his first official studio release, he’s going to find himself a most welcome newcomer to the hierarchy of independent musicians in the American indie underground. This is the first of many steps in a road to developing a multipurpose pop music all his own, and it’s undisputedly essential listening this January.
Jodi Marxbury